All The Things You Are

Many thanks to the amazing Sheryl Bailey for this week’s session in which we covered the following compositions:

“Sonnymoon for Two” by Sonny Rollins.
“All The Things You Are” by Jerome Kern.

The session started with a run through of “Sonnymoon for Two” with the co-op members taking a couple of choruses each. Here’s a clip towards the end with Derek’s solo on vibes (who knew? we thought he was merely a great drummer) followed by Sheryl closing the song:

During our solos Sheryl had been listening and picked up on some good playing especially by Giulio and Mickey and also spotted areas where there could be improvements (surely not!). Here are a few of her observations, hints and tips; plenty to consider:

After a short break, we turned to “All The Things You Are”. Here we are again, towards the end with Giulio on bass followed by Derek on vibes and then finally Sheryl closing it down:

Sheryl applied tritone subs at every point possible to give the following changes:

To get these changes consider a ii-V-I in C major

| Dm7 | G7 | CMaj7 | // |

We can apply a tritone Db7 substitution for the G7 to give

| Dm7 | Db7 | CMaj7 | // |

then whenever we see a ii chord we can add its related V and wherever we see a V chord we can add its related ii to convert them to a ii-V, giving the following:

| Dm7 G7 | Abm7 Db7 | CMaj7 | // |


Here’s Sheryl plugging a ii-V lick into the resulting changes:

If members of the Cambridge Jazz Co-op should take anything away from this session it would be the idea that “I don’t need to comp“:

Well, that was epic. Many thanks to Sheryl for coming to Cambridge and being so generous with her time and comments to the members of the Cambridge Jazz Co-op.